Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

I tried to comment on my own blog, and Typepad is barfing out on me. WithaK, I have this to say:

Ben has already expressed interest in Resident Evil. It will be interesting to see which games he decides that he wants first. As for me, Zelda is on the list!  Thanks!

In other Wii news (what else is there right now?), I finished chapter 2-4 last night and have the third heart right now. I was going to find the pillar so that I could just place the heart and go to bed, but I got distracted by the pipe that led to the "Pit of 100 Trials." It’s easy so far… just kill all the Goombas or whatever and one of them will have a key that leads you to the next room.

Except I got tired and offed myself. I enjoy the fact that I can restart the game from before that point when I go back to it. Tonight, maybe? My parents are both coming to stay with us for a couple days to celebrate the holiday of BBQ. I’m going to set them up playing some of the mini games on Wii Sports and Wii Play and I think they each might find at least one that they enjoy. That will be amusing.

I have a big day ahead of me at work today, so I better get going. Especially if I want to take advantage of the low-key "sneak out a little early the day before a holiday" tradition.

Ben and I need to get a new camera before the family reunion in two weeks. We have a nicer digital camera from a few years ago that is sputtering more and more at inconvenient times. It’s probably okay that we missed taking a few more pictures of our adorable cats (hey, we don’t have kids to brag about!) but there were some other things that we missed, too. And all of our other cameras died long ago.

Maybe with the new camera, Ben will be motivated to share the photo files with me over the network…  our computers are on different floors now, so it’s even harder for me to keep tabs on what happens to the photos after he pulls them off the camera. I want to post more photos here.

Also, I want to fix the blog fugliness that currently spreads across your entire browser and doesn’t look like anything fun. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make it black with green type. I just need to spice it up a little. But using Movable Type through Yahoo! Web Hosting makes it a little difficult… I’m not technically a Movable Type customer, so they don’t want to support me, and Yahoo! has told me that Movable Type is its own thing so they don’t support it, either. Niiiiiiiice.

Gah!  Must go earn paycheck!

My little sister is so cool and I’m very proud of her. She’s the second name on a research paper that now has an abstract on PubMed! It’s called Kainate-induced seizures, oxidative stress and neuronal loss in aging rats.

Congratulations, M Beaudoin! I still don’t completely understand what it is that you’re doing, but it sounds important and cool. I followed along in the abstract until the first kainate…

Keep up the good work as you Pile it Higher and Deeper. 

One more thing before I call it a night: two links.

Wil Wheaton’s blog entry, Patton Oswalt on geeks vs. nerds

Neil Gaiman and his guest blogger daughter Maddy get the lolcats treatment on Livejournal’s new community, lolgaimans.

My darling Ben set his alarm clock this morning for 7:30 so that he could check the Sunday ads and race out to Target if they advertised the Wii console. He woke me up to tell me that it wasn’t in the ad, but he was going to go shopping anyway to at least take advantage of the 4th of July pop sales that are going on right now. Sigh, another week until potential Wii ownership (we’re too stubborn to pre-order the bundles on ebgames.com).

I woke up later and Ben still wasn’t home, so I made some coffee and started reading the paper. He came home with armfuls of 12-packs that will surely get us through until Christmas 2009. We chatted a little about that fact and other mundane stuff, and then I went to the front room to retrieve the paper…

Lo and behold, there was a Target bag sitting on the couch with a brand new Wii console inside!!!  Note to self: must clean up that pile of bricks I left behind.

Yes, Ben is a smart man. He went to Target first because, you know, just in case. And they had pop on sale. So he walked over to the electronics area first and looked in the Wii case, not expecting to find anything. Yet he saw a handful of boxes too big to be games or accessories…

Yes, some Targets do actually put out the consoles on a Sunday in which they don’t run the ad, contrary to what I had been told. They only had about 7, not the 30 or 40 that they get when they run the ad in the paper. So it’s a good thing that Ben went early…

Did I mention how cool it was and how grateful I am that I could sleep in while my husband ventured into scary commerce and valiantly conquered the dragons of bad fortune? Ben, you R0xx0R!

So instead of working on anything website-related, I spent many glorious hours in front of our insanely big TV with an insanely awesome game system that didn’t take long to win me over completely. I started with the game it comes with, Wii Sports, and played tennis, baseball and bowling like never before. The Wiimote is quite intuitive, and I’m impressed. I also spent some time creating a few Mii characters… though that function has yet to be fully explored because we don’t have the LAN adapter.

What else did Ben buy at Target? The one game that I REALLY wanted: Super Paper Mario. O.M.G.

I’m an old school Nintendo gamer, and had a hard time getting used to the more complicated controllers of recent years as well as the games. I don’t have enough testosterone in me to love all those shooters (as much as Ben wants me to play Halo 2 so that I’ll want us to get a 360 so that he can play Halo 3). Games in general just haven’t been as exciting and intriguing for me since the original NES. And for some reason, I never owned a Gamecube. Things might have been different if I had, but I only played it at friends’ houses where they whooped my ass because they were used to playing and I wasn’t. Everyone knows that’s always a bummer.

It’s late and I’m geeking out over Super Paper Mario. The gameplay is incredible, with just enough old school Mario Bros. thrown in to make me giddy. The whole flipping between 2-D and 3-D I thought was going to be a nightmare for me, since my G.Q. (Gaming Quotient) is pretty low and the idea of 3-D Mario was intimidating. But the new tricks came easily and I played for hours (sorry, Ben). Awesome. Just awesome.

It’s going to take me a little while to get through the game, as I’m only on chapter 2-2. But I’m looking forward to it (even the times when I repeatedly die trying to figure something out).

No wonder it’s been so freaking hard to find a Wii in stock. Nintendo did an amazing job. In the words of Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar: We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!

Maybe not worthy, but very, very happy!

</ gwiik out >